Private Roads Are Possible -- I've Seen Them

A reductio that is commonly used against free marketers and libertarians is "What about roads?"

Most people think that only the government can put up roads and that a system of private roads is impossible.

But, I know private roads are possible, because I've been on one.

Here's the story. My wife is Swiss, and so every year we go visit my inlaws in Switzerland, where they have a beautiful chalet overlooking the picture-postcard Alpine valley where their village lies.

This year, our visit intersected with the Swiss National Holiday, and so we decided to go to a field uphill from our house where the traditional bonfire and fireworks (and accordion music and bratwurst and beer) would be had.

As we drove up, my father in law explained to us that he would have to pay a toll: the road to the field in question was private. Here's the story my father told me: the farmers uphill from the village had had an unpaved road since time immemorial, and desired a paved road. They asked for the local government to pave the road. The government said that was too expensive. So the farmers just built it.

And we did drive on the private road! It exists!

What's more--and this might be the most Swiss thing I've ever seen--there is no barrier or checkpoint to get on the private road. Instead, on the side of the road, there is just a simple wooden box. On the box is inscribed the fare, and you put the fare in the box, and you keep driving. (On our day, it turned out that the fare had been waived for the national holiday.)

For a free market nerd like myself, this was a moment of great revelation.

It's got everything that we think is impossible: high quality, privately-provisioned public goods ; stingy governments ; useful local initiative.

So don't let anyone tell you private roads aren't possible!

To get more serious for a moment, obviously this doesn't "prove" that we should privatize all roads. This is just one road in one place, and by no means an important one.

And, to add a conservative snag to my libertarian joy, what is to my mind the coolest thing about this private road--enforcement via wooden box--also shows why privatization is not a ready-made answer for every problem. The private road is possible for the same reason that enforcement via wooden box is possible for the same reason that a Swiss pedestrian on a completely deserted road will wait for the Walk/Don't Walk signal to turn green to cross the road.

These sorts of successful experiments in deconcentrated provision of services is only possible in a certain cultural context. Free market capitalism isn't just about certain rules, it cannot work without a depth of human capital, a shared belief in "playing fair" and otherwise adhering to certain unwritten mores. If you have the rules without the culture, you just get Russia in the 1990s or Iraq in 2005. Switzerland has been living with limited government and deconcentrated initiative for centuries upon centuries. Meanwhile in the United States, the privatization of, say, prisons, has been an utter disaster.

I'm writing about the Swiss private road story first to show that we greatly suffer from a failure of imagination when it comes to what private initiative can accomplish. But at the same time, the Swiss private road story doesn't just show "the magic of the free market." It also shows the importance of culture, and even tradition, in sustaining it.